News:

If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

So I'm thinking what if there was a superhero who was immune to fire or choking, who worked as a fireman. He is in fact an alien, the last of a dying race, who was sent to earth to spare him his civilization's destruction.

Supposed acts of spontaneous human combustion are taking place, killing people and burning houses down. However, these are in fact being staged by an evil organization of unknown origin, to remove old people and buildings from a prime peace of real estate in the setting, without having to pay the market price. Our hero carefully tracks them down, only to be disgusted by their depraved evil and give them an epic ass kicking in the finale.

The hero and the former lieutenant of an evil overlord team up on a mission to kill him. Along the way, our almost sickeningly pure and good hero tries to find out what makes our former villain tick. A metaphorical and literal journey into the Heart of Darkness results, as we learn the lieutenant has issues resulting from early in his life (namely being the bastard of a lord, and thus denied the birthright privileges accorded to his younger half-brother, instead relying on his skill in combat to make a name for himself in this world, and thus falling into the mercenary business, which eventually led him to work for the evil overlord). Instead of exposing him as a villain with a Freudian excuse for his crimes, we see that while he is a fairly dark person, his agenda was far less harmful than that of the Big Bad, and so he comes across as non-evil, and even perhaps an Anti-villain.

Set 100 years in the future, in the aftermath of superpowered terrorists attacks (like those described by John Robb) world infrastructure has fallen apart. Our "hero" is a wheeler and dealer who survives by trading in "advanced" (ie just pre-crash) technology. He happens to owe money to a particular corporate conglomerate, due to a gambling and drug habit that has him frittering away much of what he does make, and leaving him in massive debt when it comes to daily goods, like rent and food.

Because of the dire position he is in, he decides to loot a military base, where it was rumoured (according to a crackpot photocopy sheet which survived the crash and found its way into his hands) that hi-tech experiments were taking place. While attempting to loot the place, he gets...infected, by a particular piece of technology, which renders him invisible to the naked eye. At first, the effects are random, but later on he manages to gain a degree of control over when it happens, and to what extent. At first, he uses it to simply feed his voyeuristic desires, and the occasional theft, but as he moves from place to place in the city he lives, he comes to appreciate the squalor people are kept in, while the corporate conglomerate he owes money to, stockpiles technology and lives in the lap of luxury by comparison.

It is the year 2020. The teleporter is invented. The technology is actually somewhat cheap, and teleporters begin showing up all over the world. You are able to get one in your house at about the same cost as a car. Mankind is able to cheaply and quickly get from point A to point B on the other side of the world. The whole world changes - you can work in New York City and go home that night to your mansion in India. Drug trade goes through the roof. Terrorism is ubiquitous. The value of money falls into chaos and there are plans for a global currency.

Teleporting is also a little dicey. Sometimes you end up somewhere other than where you expected. The technology is still pretty young.

The story, however, is about a teleporter repairman.

His hobby is juryrigging teleporters so that at a certain time, they will teleport their passenger to a killer party in Dubai.

At first he has a lot of fun creating escapism from the weird weird world. He teleports bored people into this awesome party, and when they go home they've become world citizens instead of locals using their teleporters to go to work.

the theme is that once the barriers of space have been eliminated, separation between people will be eliminated. If you can have tea in a different city every day, how long can you keep that up before you get numb to the wonders of modern civilization? The new focus becomes creating new places to visit rather than visiting the old world.

I also wonder -- if people had teleporters, I wonder how adventurous they'd get. I know a lot of people here would want to go do some pretty awesome things if they could teleport anywhere in the world for free. But I have a feeling a lot of people would just visit their "dream vacation" spot every single day until they had assimilated it into their routine.

There is actually a Hayden Christensen movie about a guy who gets an ability like this. Its not technology, but inborn, and only a few others have it. He uses it to rob banks and get rich, and then party and surf all over the world.

Oh, and there is some stupid religious bigotry/romance subplot, but that was crap. Focusing on it, from a technological and society-wide/global point of view would be far more fun, and questioning.